Chapter VII: At the Cedars

It had cost Grace a struggle before she decided to take Maude as her companion, and she had been driven past the little log house among the hills and through the Bush district, that she might judge for herself of the girl’s surroundings. The day was raw and blustering, and great banks of snow were piled against the fences and lay heaped up in the road unbroken save by a foot path made by the children’s feet.

“And it is through this she walks in the morning, and then sits all day in that dingy room. I don’t believe I should like it,” Grace thought, and that night she wrote to Maude, offering her a situation with herself.

And now, on a lovely morning in April, when the crocuses and snowdrops were just beginning to blossom, she sat waiting for her, wondering if she had done well or ill for herself. She had seen Maude and talked with her, for the latter had called at the Cedars and spent an hour or more, and Grace had learned much from her of her former life and of Spring Farm, which she was going to buy back. Max’s name, however, was not mentioned, although he was constantly in the minds of both, and Grace was wondering if he would come oftener to the Cedars if Maude were there. She could not be jealous of the girl, and yet the idea had taken possession of her that she was bringing her to the Cedars for Max rather than for herself, and this detracted a little from her pleasure when she began to fit up the room her companion was to occupy. Such a pretty room it was, just over her own, with a bow window looking across the valley where the lake lay sleeping, and on to the hills and the log school-house which, had it been higher, might have been seen above the woods which surrounded it. A room all pink and white, with roses and lilies everywhere, and a bright fire in the grate before which a willow chair was standing and a Maltese kitten sleeping when Maude was ushered into it by Jane, Miss Raynor’s maid.

“Oh, it is so lovely,” Maude thought, as she looked about her, wondering if it were not a dream from which she should presently awake.

But it was no dream, and as the days went on it came to be real to her, and she was conscious of a deep and growing affection for the woman who was always so kind to her and who treated her like an equal rather than a hired companion. Together they read and talked of the books which Maude liked best, and gradually Grace learned of the dream life Maude had led before coming to Richland, and of the people who had deserted her among the hills, but who in this more congenial atmosphere came trooping back, legions of them, and crowding her brain until she had to tell of them, and of the two lives she was living, the ideal and the real. She was sitting on a stool at Grace’s feet, with her face flushed with excitement as she talked of the Kimbricks, and Websters, and Angeline Mason, who were all with her now as they had been at home, and all as real to her as Miss Raynor was herself. Laying her hand upon the girl’s brown curls, Grace said, half laughingly, “And so you are going to write a book. Well, I believe all girls have some such aspiration. I had it once, but it was swallowed up by a stronger, deeper feeling, which absorbed my whole being.”

Here Grace’s voice trembled a little as she leaned back in her chair and seemed to be thinking. Then, rousing herself, she asked suddenly, “How old are you, Maude?”

“Nineteen this month,” was Maude’s reply, and Grace went on: “Just my age when the great sorrow came. That was fourteen years ago next June. I am thirty-three, and Max is thirty-seven.”

She said this last more to herself than to Maude, who started slightly, for this was the first time his name had been mentioned since she came to the Cedars.

After a moment Grace continued: “I have never spoken to you of Mr. Gordon, although I know you have met him. You were with him on the train from Albany to Canandaigua; he told me of you.”

“He did!” Maude exclaimed, with a ring in her voice which made Grace’s heart beat a little faster, but she went calmly on:

“Yes; he was greatly interested in you, although he did not then know who you were; but he knows now. He is coming here soon. We have been engaged ever since I was seventeen and he was twenty-one; fourteen years ago the 20th of June we were to have been married. Everything was ready; my bridal dress and veil had been brought home, and I tried them on one morning to see how I looked in them. I was beautiful, Max said, and I think he told the truth; for a woman may certainly know whether the face she sees in the mirror be pretty or not, and the picture I saw was very fair, while he, who stood beside me, was splendid in his young manhood. How I loved him; more, I fear, than I loved God, and for that I was punished,—oh, so dreadfully punished. We rode together that afternoon, Max and I, and I was wondering if there were ever a girl as happy as myself, and pitying the women I met because they had no Max beside them, when suddenly my horse reared, frightened by a dog, and I was thrown upon a sharp curb-stone. Of the months of agony which followed I cannot tell you, except that I prayed to die and so be rid of pain. The injury was in my spine, and I have never walked in all the fourteen years since. Max has been true to me, and would have married me had I allowed it. But I cannot burden him with a cripple, and sometimes I wish, or think I do, that he would find some one younger, fairer than I am, on whom to lavish his love. He would make a wife so happy. And yet it would be hard for me, I love him so much. Oh, Max; I don’t believe he knows how dear he is to me.”

She was crying softly now, and Maude was crying, too; and as she smoothed the snow-white hair and kissed the brow on which lines were beginning to show, she said:

“He will never find a sweeter face than yours.”

To her Max Gordon now was only the betrothed husband of her mistress, and still she found herself looking forward to his visit with a keen interest, wondering what he would say to her, and if his eyes would kindle at sight of her as they had done when she saw him in the church at Laurel Hill. He was to come on the 20th, the anniversary of the day which was to have been his bridal day, and when the morning came, Grace said to Maude:

“I’d like to wear my wedding gown; do you think it would be too much like Dickens’ Miss Havershaw?”

“Yes, yes,” Maude answered, quickly, feeling that faded satin and lace of fourteen years’ standing would be sadly out of place. “You are lovely in those light gowns you wear so much,” she said.

So Grace wore the dress which Maude selected for her; a soft, woolen fabric of a creamy tint, with a blue shawl, the color of her eyes, thrown around her, and a bunch of June pinks, Max’s favorite flowers, at her belt, Then, when she was ready, Maude wheeled her out to the piazza, where they waited for their visitor.